Servant is a haunted house story. The Dwell-worthy brownstone newscaster Dorothy Turner (Lauren Ambrose) shares with her celebrity chef husband Sean (Toby Kebbell) serves as the setting for four seasons of the show, only rarely venturing past the front door. M. Night Shyamalan and creator Tony Basgallop launched the AppleTV+ series months before the world locked down due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Servant takes what would be an interesting premise for a ninety-minute movie and stretches it out to a rather more punishing five hours. Not much happens at the start, and while a little time to develop a sense of mood and menace can work well in horror, here it just feels like padding, when it’s not resembling an advertisement for upscale real estate. Though there’s a seed of an interesting idea in Servant, it’s weighed down by a checklist of tiresome horror cliches. Screechy, discordant score? Check. Spooky religious imagery? Check. Menacing fakeouts? Check and check. That being said, Servant does build a nice sense of claustrophobia, and it plays around, albeit tentatively, with the idea of trauma, and how the tricks our brains play on us to “help” deal with it aren’t always that helpful.